The Lives That Changed Along the Way

By Melissa Hardin

As the book prepares to come out, I have spent the last several weeks looking through old pictures and videos from five years ago. It has been an unexpected journey back in time.

My heart moves between tears of sadness and pain and tears of complete joy and pride.

Our family survived.

In fact, I would say we thrived.

I say our family because this did not happen only to Sophie.

I will never undercut the journey she has been on—the fear, the pain, the devastation of having a life completely altered in an instant, and the unknown she was forced to walk into. But the truth is that when the AVM ruptured in Sophie's brain, it impacted every member of our family. Every one of us was changed. Every one of our lives was sent down a different trajectory.

And five years later, I find myself thinking not only about what happened to Sophie, but about the people who surrounded her. The fierce love and protection they built around her. The ways they quietly sacrificed. The ways they were changed, too.

Sophie is back to work in the field she studied in college. She lives in an apartment again. She is dating. She drives.

She still lives with deficits in both receptive and expressive language. Sometimes she plays a very elaborate game of charades with us when she can't find a word. We still repeat things for her or give her a few extra beats to catch up when she is listening. Her reading is still not back to normal. She is still missing almost half of her vision. And sometimes her memory bank simply gets tired and shuts down for a while.

But that little girl—who isn't so little anymore and turned 28 last month—has found workarounds. She has learned how to play toward her strengths and compensate for what remains lost.

We are watching her live a life we were told five years ago might not be possible.

It hasn't been easy. There were dark moments I would never want to live through again.

But here we are.

Five years later.

And as Sophie so often does, she is defying expectations.

The Sister Who Held Her Foot

Today, though, I find myself thinking about the others.

I was looking at pictures of my oldest daughter, Sarah, from the morning after it happened. She and Sam had jumped on the first flight they could get out of Dallas. They arrived knowing Sophie had made it through the night, but also knowing that she would likely never come off the ventilator.

Sarah is today a Fellow in Pediatric Hospital Medicine. Even then, she understood medicine in a way the rest of us didn't. She knew what the doctors were saying. She understood the scans and what they revealed.

She knew that we had entered the hospital with Sophie's body signaling brain death. She understood that the post-surgery scans showed a large, golf-ball-sized area of Sophie's brain that was simply no longer there because the damage had been so extensive that it had to be removed.

We were not medically trained. We did not fully understand the reality of our Sophie girl as she lay in that bed.

There is a picture posted on this website that I looked at differently today. Sarah is standing at the end of Sophie's hospital bed after arriving from Dallas. The doctor is showing her the scans—before surgery and after.

And I noticed something I had never noticed before.

Sarah's hand is holding Sophie's foot.

As the doctor explains the hardest realities, Sarah is touching her sister.

Just a simple grip on a foot.

A sister making a connection.

Almost as if she were saying, I'm here.

She had no idea where we would be 24 hours later. She understood a reality that the rest of us, in our ignorance, were mercifully protected from—and with that understanding came a fear she carried largely on her own. While we clung to hope without fully understanding what we were facing, Sarah knew what those scans meant.

And in that moment, I can see both things at once: the doctor who understood the gravity of what was happening and the big sister who simply needed to touch her sister and say, I'm here.

Those moments changed Sarah.

Those moments became part of the doctor she is today.

She was designed for pediatric medicine, and she would have been an amazing doctor regardless. But the weeks and months we spent in that hospital and the lessons she learned from the family side of medicine changed her in ways that would not have happened had we not walked this path.

Even today, she is our wisdom and our voice when something needs to happen with Sophie.

And her big-sister radar?

It is honed and vigilant in a way it never was before.

The Sister Who Gave Us Away

I am currently planning Catie's wedding.

She is marrying a young man who entered her life within weeks of what happened to Sophie. He and Catie walked through some very dark moments together.

Sophie has forgotten much of that first year. Her brain was rewiring, rebuilding, trying to make sense of a world that had suddenly become unfamiliar.

But Catie remembers.

She watched the days when Sophie raged at her new reality and at the deficits she had awakened to. She watched Sophie struggle with the simplest things—the things the rest of us move through every day without a second thought.

She held Sophie when Dad and I had to run down the hall and quickly get dressed so we could take her to the hospital in the middle of the night because she was having another seizure.

She watched her dad and me struggle, fumble, and sometimes simply have no idea what to do in those early months.

And in many ways, she gave up her parents.

She gave up the version of Mom and Dad she had known because our energy, our attention, and our hearts were consumed with trying to make Sophie whole again.

There is a sacrifice in that that I don't think I fully understood at the time.

I understand it differently now.

The One Who Held Us Together

And then there was Kevin.

He held us together.

He led us in a whole new way while carrying his own fears about what was happening.

He prioritized Sophie and her healing, even when it came at the cost of being fully present at work. He turned toward home in a way he had never been required to before.

He became the primary cheerleader of our home.

And somehow, while carrying his own fear and grief, he held me up so that I could have what it took to hold the girls together.

There are things you don't realize about people until life becomes impossibly hard.

You discover what they are made of.

You discover what you are made of.

And sometimes you discover that the strength you thought you needed to find in yourself was never yours to begin with.

Carried

We have all found a new relationship with God.

All of us were saved. All of us walked with God before this happened. But there is a difference between knowing about dependence on God and actually having no choice but to depend on Him.

We learned a deep dependence that wasn't there before.

And so often, in those days, we simply allowed Him to carry us.

Isn't that a picture?

I sometimes pray in the car, and I picture Jesus sitting next to me.

When I walk, I talk to God about His creation and the beauty He has blessed us all with.

Yes, I picture myself driving with Jesus.

I picture myself walking with God.

But when I think about these last five years and the things we survived, I see something different.

I see myself being carried.

Carried across His arms, my head resting against His chest, too weary to think or do anything except let Him carry me.

My independence was gone.

My false belief that I had control was gone.

And somewhere in that loss, I found something much deeper.

In prayer, I often pray words about the character of God. But those words are different now.

They are deeper.

They are bigger.

They are no longer words I say by rote, based on lessons I learned in Sunday school about the character of God.

They are words rooted in firsthand knowledge.

Because we met a God who walked through the fire with us.

And we met a God who handed us a miracle.

The Rebuild

We have been changed.

Our lives were sent down another path.

Life hit us like a toddler wreaking havoc on a tower of blocks. Everything we thought we had built came crashing down, and we stood staring at the aftermath—angry, frustrated, confused, grieving what had been lost.

But then we began to rebuild.

And somehow, in the rebuilding, each of us found a stronger foundation.

A different build.

Maybe even a better one.

Would I choose to walk this path again?

No.

It was hard.

It was painful.

There are parts of those years I would never willingly revisit.

But do I feel blessed by the lives we have today?

Yes.

Do I feel joy?

Absolutely.

Do I look at my family and see people who have been changed?

Without question.

And perhaps that is the part I understand most clearly now, five years later.

The AVM changed Sophie's life.

But it changed all of ours, too.

It took things from us that we can never get back.

And yet, in the rebuilding, it gave us things we never would have known otherwise.

A daughter who defied every expectation.

A sister who already knew her calling, but came to understand more fully what it means to care not only for a child, but for the family carrying that child through the hardest moments of their lives. 

A sister who learned what true sacrificial love looks like.

A husband who learned to carry his family in a new way.

And a family who learned what it truly means to be carried by God.

Five years ago, I would have given anything to go back and rebuild the tower exactly as it was.

Today, I look at what stands in its place and realize something:

The pieces didn't go back the way they were.

But somehow, God knew exactly how to put them back together.